Email users suffer from having access to too much information. When a user purchases a product online, the company frequently automatically signs the user up for receiving notifications of sales and new products. Service providers will send monthly emails with summaries of news and helpful tips for maintaining a car, health information, a house, etc. If a user's email address is ever revealed on a website, it can result in the user receiving spam.
One solution to being overwhelmed with emails is to create filters. The user identifies email addresses and request that emails from that address be blocked or relegated to an email folder that the user can avoid ever opening. This will not work if a subset of the emails from a sender are actually important and need to be read. For example, a student loan company sends both advertisements for products and information about the loans. The user can also make a more sophisticated filter that combines an email address with keywords so that all emails that end in “clothing.com” and contain the words “new” or “sale” are filtered while emails about recent orders remain in the inbox. This reduces the number of junk emails but does not solve the problem altogether because emails often get miscategorized. This approach is too blunt a tool to work effectively.
What is needed is a way to better organize emails.